


To Seek a Newer World

by middlemarch



Series: Shadow Season 2 [3]
Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Angst, Delirium, Episode 3, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Mathematics, Nurses & Nursing, Romance, Season 2 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 03:08:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 12,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9638369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: The course of an illness and its costs.





	1. “I knew it so well once”

**Author's Note:**

> This is my AU for Episode 3 "One Equal Temper," in which I try to grapple with what I perceive as the inconsistencies of the canon world and explore the characters more fully. The title is another line from Tennyson's Ulysses, reflecting my attempt to create my own newer world for these delightful, conflicted people. Relevant endnotes will appear as needed. I have used some dialogue from the show in certain chapters and others are entirely my own invention. And yes, this is still the mathematical Mary I prefer.

She had never considered herself an especially devout woman. It was simply that she believed and had little trouble seeing God’s mind made manifest around her; He was present and removed at once, in air that became breath and the numbers and radii that tacked down the world. Her worship was for her small self and not Him. Similarly, she had never found herself called to pray, considering that she had been given all she needed and unconvinced there would be a voice who answered. It was the illness, the threat not of death but abandonment, had catalyzed her alteration. She had not been able to bear that she would be sent away, away from Jedediah most importantly, but also from her duty, her vocation, the self she had become at Mansion House and so she had been praying every moment she was awake, praying to God that she would get well and return to her previous life. And that Jedediah, unused to looking at her in this way, would not see.

Where, when had she learned all the prayers that filled her mouth, that made a melody in her mind of the clamorous terror that possessed her? Her church was not given to elaborate invocation and her mother would have described the intricate strings of words Mary whispered to be showy and prideful but still, she must say them. There were fragments of the nuns’ novenas and rosaries, like pearls that had become unknotted and restrung and psalms Henry Hopkins had turned to his own use. And some were very simple appeals with the purity of a jay’s sharp cry— _please_ and _Oh God!_ and _help me_ ; these last were on her lips when she woke from sleep, from the dreams that beset her, when the fever rose and the pain she must conceal resumed prowling along her nerves, swiping a claw at her belly before coming to rest at the base of her skull as if the jaws of a lion were there, ready to snap shut and take off her head. 

There were hours when she felt she needn’t try so hard to seem well, the recovery Jed and Anne Hastings seemed sure she would make nearly hers; there was a return of clarity to her thought, vitality to her limbs and the rest she had refreshed her. She was able to take up her mathematics, the Gauss that was her old companion, the copies of _Crelle_ her sister-in-law had sent to her from Berlin that Mary had impulsively packed in her carpetbag where most women would have brought another petticoat. She wrote letters to Annaliese and the Freedman’s Society and prepared a report to send to Miss Dix with the innovations she had made and a thorough tally of her successes and failures. If Jedediah came, she rejoiced to be able to talk with him in something like their old way, though she noticed he was careful not to say anything about his marriage, the equivocal state of their own attachment or anything pertaining to Charlotte Jenkins. Mary could not decide if it was because he was being a responsible physician sparing her the demands of an argument or acting like a little boy, trying to avoid anything that might make him unhappy.

But those times were briefer and less frequent than she wanted, than Jedediah seemed to expect and the rest she must disguise from him—the torturous dreams with their horrifying convolutions and grotesques, more disturbing the visions she had, waking and asleep, that followed her from night to day, her parents, Gustav, her sister Caroline who’d died in childbirth a few months after Gustav had died, no longer shadow but not flesh. There were voices that called her, Jedediah’s most often, as vivid as when he suffered the lack of the needle and cursed and begged her in the same breath, that keening sound he made when he wept for his mother, the fearful moaning that meant he thought he was lost and not worth the finding, the delighted, aroused gasp she had swallowed when she kissed him that would not give her any peace. 

It was terrifying not to know what was real and not to be able to ask. She must pause every time she heard a voice or saw someone sitting in the chair in the corner, a figure passing by the open doorway to peer inside and try to gauge the responses of those around her. When she heard Jedediah weeping or the baby crying for her, it took all her willpower not to call out _I’m coming, love,_ not to push back the bed linens and hurry to the one who needed her. She could not control her expression entirely and Sister Isabella had taken to offering frequent reassurance when she observed what she thought was Mary startled by something ordinary like the sound of a book’s cover meeting the page, the muted pop of the uncorked bottle of medicine marring the quiet. There were few real visitors other than Jedediah and the women who nursed her; she would have welcomed the chaplain but none of them wished to risk his health and it was not seemly for Samuel to look in, though she missed his sensible, even temper and his gentle acuity. The new chief, Major McBurney, who she would have been relieved to be spared the sight of was strangely constant but fractured like a kaleidoscope—his pale face and his uneasy eyes, the light glinting off the polished buttons of his jacket, those long white hands clasped together too tightly or fidgeting like a spider’s legs, all appeared framed by the door jamb or just inside the room. He never spoke but she felt his regard like its own infection and she did not know why he would come so often when he had been so adamant she leave. It seemed at times he would follow her into her dreams, to watch her there with that gaze that was half malevolent and half beseeching. When she woke to find Jedediah sitting beside her with the stillness that meant he was exhausted, the thermometer snug and familiar pressed against her and only her father across the room, the respite was so great she spoke without thinking,

“I had strange dreams. Visions.”

Jedediah had removed the thermometer and studied its result while she spoke, but she had surprised him she supposed, considering his tone when he asked “What sort of visions?" She saw her father begin to recite and joined him as they had always done when she was well enough, the rhythm of the lines as comforting as the scent of leather-bound books and pipe-smoke that always clung to Papa, but the words would not come though she strove for them even as she tried to make Papa go. He was not needed now, not when Jedediah’s dark eyes watched her with a tender intensity. She tasted salt.

“I knew it so well once,” she murmured and he made a sound like a sigh. She was not the Mary he wanted and she could not help disappointing him. Perhaps Major McBurney would insist if he knew, if Anne said or Jedediah. He had promised that day when he saved her, again and again, but there was a question in his eyes and she was afraid to ask which one it was, even more of the answer. She hardly recognized herself speaking, saying, “I know sick nurses are sometimes sent home but I don’t want that. I must stay here. You, you know-- Please?”

Anne was a rustling sound, a collection of colors, a sense of opprobrium. Jedediah appeared to forget she was in the room with them when he stopped addressing her but Mary did not. Still, he had not answered her and the pause meant something she did not want to consider. He didn’t understand but she would try to make him.

“I have nothing to return to. Without you, I can’t, oh don’t you see?”

“Don’t worry, Mary. You will remain here under my care,” he said quickly but patiently. He lifted his hand as if he would lay it somewhere to soothe her but let it fall into his lap. Did he think, could he think she wouldn’t want his touch? She had embraced him and then pushed him away, she had castigated him and lied. She heard him, day and night, in her mind and without, his voice in the hallway, his tears, his accusations and his laughter. It must be clear between them.

“When we argued… about smallpox… about that night,” she said, halting, unsure, wanting him to know without her needing to say how guilty she felt and how bereft, how much she loved him even though, even though…

“Not now. We’ll talk about everything soon,” he said. Soon—an hour or a lifetime? She remember Anne was with them and that there might be other reasons he did not wish to talk. He had other responsibilities, his wife and his work, and she was not the former and only part of the latter. He leaned closer and gave her the thoughtful, serious smile she had fallen in love with, adding “And had I no obligations, I would stay with you all day and tend you and you alone.”

What an image he painted! No other person interfering, not officious, capable Anne, nor Emma with her tentative hands, amiable Sister Isabella, only Jedediah beside her, holding the cup to her lips and saying “there you are, a little more,” brushing the loose hair back from her face, laying a cool cloth on her face or pulling the covers higher so she would not shiver. He would crowd out any other visions or dreams, the night filled with his dark eyes and the moonlight, a dozen possibilities that she would treasure in her heart and risk confessing in the soft light of a cloudy day. She could not have it, only the fantasy and the knowledge that he shared it. Downstairs were a hundred men, maybe more, who needed him and a senior officer he must find a way to manage lest the hospital collapse under the strain of their mutual enmity. She would try to remember what she would have said without thinking before she had fallen ill; she ignored the tears she wept that were joy and melancholy mixed.

“Yes, go see your patients. And you might make amends with Major McBurney, he is—it will be hard for the men if the chief and the executive officer are at odds. It would be for the best if you…spoke to him. I shall rest, I shall wait for you, when you can come back to me,” she said, aware that she had ruined the impression she meant to give of the Head Nurse able to organize the place from her sickbed with her obvious, plaintive conclusion. He would see through the weak pretense she made framing her questions as indifferent statements. Would he tease her? Scold? Had she overstepped? She thought it must be the illness, the way the fever took her insidiously, that sapped her confidence and made her tremble; she could not allow that it was the way she loved him now. He touched her hand very lightly, the way he would brush a kiss on her eyelids, and the smile was in his gaze, his voice, not his lips.

“We’ll talk about everything soon.”


	2. “I have nothing to return to”

Mary kept company with her dead in her illness. Perhaps she did so when she was well, Anne couldn’t say, having established such a chasm between them as could not be breached except by the most dire need—an influx of grievously wounded men, a riot, the typhoid that took all Anne’s expertise to force into remission. The disease that had forced their greater intimacy had revealed Mary to Anne in ways she might have anticipated and others she could not. The lace on each of Mary’s nightdresses was exquisitely fine but worn despite the evidence of careful laundering and any ribbon strung at the neck was colorless with age. There was a luxurious paisley shawl in the same drawer that held Mary’s nightclothes that Anne had never seen the Head Nurse wear, not even to a Sunday service led by the chaplain on what passed for a holiday in Mansion House. There was a daguerreotype of the Baron with a small sprig of rosemary tucked in the frame, “for remembrance,” Anne presumed, a scrap of foolscap listing medicines poking from the leaves of a heavy German text. These tangible items were suggested aspects of Mary Anne had had not known but at least might have imagined; what the sick woman said, waking and sleeping and the in-between state that she occupied more than Jed Foster would acknowledge, had shown Anne a Mary she couldn’t quite understand.

Anne was used to her patients calling for their Mama and Mary did that, plaintive and beseeching as any gut-shot boy in a fever. But she did not only call for her mother, she explained and conversed, inquired into her health and talked about the difficulties she had preparing her husband’s favorite dishes, how stubborn the range was and how much more stubborn she was herself, a fault her mother had not been able to correct. There were the hours Mary spoke and sang in German, a language Anne had only the faintest comprehension of, but she found she could make out the meaning behind Mary’s repetitions of _Liebchen, ich habe dich vermisst, warum bist du gegangen?_ and the way her low contralto, roughened by her catarrh, made a round out of song she could not find the end to, the longing she imbued the word _Traum_ with, the unusual undercurrent of fear. Anne had heard recitations of Tennyson and arguments about the merits of suffrage, the shared memory of roasting apples Mary reminded her Papa of, the firm, proud tone Mary used when she insisted _I **do** love him, Papa_. Mary complained that her sister Caro was plaiting her hair too tightly when Sister Isabella attended to her disarray, reassured the young nun that the boys were safe with Frederick’s mother in Worcester, that Mary had seen it for herself and they had not forgotten her. Mary wept when they would not bring her the baby that cried, imploring Anne that _he needs me, I’ll be careful, oh! can’t you hear him_ , pulling at the neckline of her night-dress as if she would put the absent baby to her breast, a gesture familiar to both Anne and Sister Isabella but one they did not discuss. Anne was not made of stone and stroked Mary’s hair when she wanted her dead child, telling her the midwife would bring him soon, just a little while longer to wait; Mary would raise her dark eyes to Anne then and Anne could not tell if Mary knew her or what she remembered.

Mary only called for those lost to her, it seemed to Anne, and so the older woman didn’t know what to make of Mary’s cries for Jed Foster, who sat by her bedside every free moment, looked in when he woke and before he retired for the night, haggard with the care of the men secondary to his concern for the sick woman he was so clearly, devotedly besotted with. Mary seemed to have some sense of him, even while she slept; Anne had not heard her moan his name in despair when he was in the room, but it was not unusual in the very dark hours of the early morning. She begged his pardon for some infraction Anne could not divine. Certainly, there was no evidence of the man’s displeasure with Mary whom he nursed as tenderly as a child. He turned away when they bathed her, but there was no aura of embarrassment or shame, only a grave respect for Mary’s dignity, his nearly-successful attempt at a physician’s impartial query about her physical state, the rash, whether she guarded her belly, any report of the fever’s worsening. He smiled to hear Mary’s broken singing, in German or the hymns she favored, and enumerated every sign that she was recovering like the nuns told their rosaries. Anne recalled how it felt to love her patient, how Robin’s every flicker of returning health had lit her from within, the subjugation of her clinical experience to the urgent hope of her heart.

Nurse Phinney Anne had hated, loathed for her promotion and her deliberate, calm confidence that she could reform the hospital that had been Anne’s domain. She had mocked her and demeaned her. Mary von Olnhausen she nursed and found she pitied. She understood she had not understood her and learned perhaps, she wanted to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mary sings a Schubert Lieder "Das Leben is ein Traum" (Life is a Dream). I hope the German translator didn't let me down; she is supposed to be saying "Darling, I have missed you, where did you go?" There is some fanon floating around that Mary lost a child during her marriage-- I am imagining a premature birth of a son, before Gustav died. Caro is taken from emmadelosnardos's "Not Music..." world where Mary's sister Caroline dies and Mary leaves to care for her young nephews; usually I let Caroline live but not this time :(
> 
> I thought we needed a little more reason for Anne to suddenly develop a sense of compassion for Mary and Jed and nursing Mary provided a viable opportunity.


	3. “…overly attuned to love”

She was watching him from the window when he arrived. He had looked upwards, surveying his new purgatory, his collar improperly starched by the deficient laundress at the boarding house, and he’d seen her, surrounded by shadows, framed by the window like a gilded icon. Her eyes were very dark and followed him as he shifted from one polished boot to the other. He heard whispering, a woman’s voice, as if she leaned over to share a secret with him alone, the scent of roses overlaid with a bitter burnt fragrance and her face shimmered and flickered in his gaze, as if every dust mote around her had been lit at once by the sun. She had braided chestnut hair and she had let it down for him, it tumbled and waved around her shoulders, against the muted calico of her bodice. She raised a hand to her face and touched her lips. The lower one was full and provocatively curved and his name slipped from her _Clayton_ and fell from the window like a flower.

Her name was Mary von Olnhausen but that was not what she was called. Summers had written that, she was a Baroness that the staff called Phinney or even Nurse Mary, without any explanation for the alteration. Neither was her true name—she was Mariya when she came to him in the night, murmuring heresy and subtle treason in between endearments, while her hands traced his lineaments, coaxing him to terrible conclusions she had made a vain pretense to ignore when she walked into his office after the English nurse had issued her own oblique, unnecessary warning. He had gestured to the chair knowing it was her throne, that she beckoned him to her side whether he was willing or not, to be her subject and vizier, to court her favor and subdue her wild nature. She was a flame and he was not sure why the whole place had not been devoured by her wicked, savage light, how he could touch her and still speak. He spoke as if in tongues, the medical training he’d been given trying to assert its hold but she threw it off; when he turned his back, she slipped away and her soul, that dark, intoxicating rose, her eyes made of its ranged petals, hovered in the rafters, surveying him.

They said she was ill, typhoid, the most common enteric, and Foster, that fool, thought he would cure her—as if she were not the fever herself. Clayton alone could hear her singing softly from the white bed, an unending, compelling melody, erotic and annihilating. Foster laid his hands on her but Clayton knew her gaze strayed from the executive officer, sought her servant though he would conceal himself; she insisted she would remain among them and he knew he had only one chance to be free, if he could take it. The ink smelled of her skin when he wrote to Miss Dix, so acrid the words shivered with it but he was strong and he kept writing, explaining what they all believed, how sick she was and how she must be removed. _Removed_ was the word he wrote but he meant wrested and exiled though the hand that did not hold the pen stroked his temple as she had, as he had wanted her to. He had had to wait days for a response and he had found she was irresistible. If she did not come to him with the twilight, he found himself outside her door. There were times when he was sure it was all a miasma, the conjuring of an over-worked mind but then he heard Mariya calling and calling and he knew he could be victorious if he acted boldly, sending her into the wider world to come apart like mist, little by little and then all at once she would never have been and those dark eyes would not be his most devastating solace any more.


	4. “The deed will be done”

It was salvageable, Anne told herself that. Mary’s illness and Jed Foster’s preoccupation with the Head Nurse were materials to work with, to mold according to her own designs. The new chief was young, inexperienced, absorbed with medical inanities and military trivialities; he had already confessed his injury to her with the barest expression of carefully diffident interest on her behalf, the consoling suggestion that she knew his strength and would cleave unto him. He liked a nodding plume, the inkwell positioned at the corner like a sentinel, charts of the brain hanging over the oils Miss Green’s father had had in the library and that Summers had collected to make his office a proper den. McBurney had tried to command Jed Foster but had chosen his field of battle poorly—for all he aggravated and incensed her, Anne recognized that Foster was the pre-eminent physician of her medical career and his current patient motivated him to excel any prior performance. Jed had dispensed with any pretense that Mary was not his sun and moon when he had determined her fever verged on the lethal; Anne had never heard such tender cajoling and reassurance associated with a more complex medical intervention he’d undertaken, let alone the homely simplicity of a ice bath. McBurney’s voice had been a tight soprano giving orders that Foster had growled away, nearly knocking his superior officer down. Jed had not noticed anything but Mary, but Anne had observed the response of everyone in the room and knew the tension that existed should be hers to manipulate in her own inimitable way. She had thought so.

“Superb. We are in perfect accord,” McBurney was saying as she walked in, perusing a letter, stroking his upper lip. He had intimated he would seek Miss Dix’s approval to appoint a new Head Nurse as Mary was clearly incapacitated for the forseeable future and she had been sure she had ingratiated herself enough, with her words and her silence when he shared the fragments of his past that explained him, with her expert care of the wound that was now finally beginning to heal. He was an even less proficient doctor than Byron, who had a demonstrable knack for surgery if not Foster’s skills in diagnosis, extensive knowledge of physiology and preternatural creativity in adapting current treatment to the patient’s need. It was to be hoped McBurney could handle paperwork as well as he did his uniform, since there was little else he appeared to offer as a physician. It was all to the good for her. She would guide him as she did Byron and Mary would answer to her when she left her sick-bed.

“She has agreed with your choice for a new head nurse?” Anne asked, subduing her glee, making sure to phrase her question with McBurney as the one whose opinion mattered most. He was a man and they expected that.

“Hmm, no, nothing like that. Miss Dix has dispatched an escort to take her away,” he replied, smiling as if he savored the taste of the last words take her away. He couldn’t mean…

“To take who away, sir?” 

“Miss Phinney, of course. Better she die at home than here, where she might cause so much more damage. By spreading her disease, I mean,” McBurney explained. He wanted her dead, he would demur if she pressed him and there was nothing to be gained there, so she did not, but everything he said after _Better she die_ was only an elaborate justification for his monstrous desire. Anne had walked the wards with him earlier in the day and he had not been so repulsed or distressed by soldiers sickening with gangrene, catarrh, dysentery. He tightened his lips at the sight of vermin but had only snapped, “Bathe them more and have the laundresses boil the linens with lye. This stink needn’t be the default.” She could not understand why he would wish the woman ill after just meeting her; it was perverse, disturbing to think that the hospital’s chief should crave any death, but without reason? Against reason? Perhaps he had misspoken.

“Miss Phinney’s on the mend, I believe, and of some value here,” she tried. Mary seemed likely to recover but a hasty departure from the stability of hospital care, a long, draining journey home without any companion, the break with Foster, who appeared to restore her vitality more than any tonic ever could—all were likely to endanger her, bring on the death McBurney had mentioned with such loathesome glibness.

“The calipers do not lie, Miss Hastings! Her brain is poorly shaped, asymmetrical with a bloated sense of amativeness,” McBurney retorted, emphasizing the last word. “Do you know what amativeness is? It means her organ is overly attuned to love. That—is a weakness,” he added. 

She could but dimly construe his meaning, that Mary was not only ill-suited to her vocation but frankly defective, simply because McBurney had some notion that she loved too well. Anne herself had been dismissed from service once for being blinded by the crushing grief of losing a man she loved but it had been done with compassion and respect, for her own protection. McBurney would risk, hope for Mary’s death because he perceived her as fatally flawed? Did he suspect something untoward between the Head Nurse and the married Executive Officer? Anne herself had wondered but had relied on Phinney’s irrepressible Yankee morality to preclude anything resembling the relationship she and Byron availed themselves of. Perhaps the suspicion, the look in Foster’s eyes and the way Mary had cried for him had been confirmation enough for McBurney, evidence of corruption that he could not abide and did not have to. Anne took a step back and tried to consider what she should say and how, to him and to another. Byron was bound to be useless and Foster, if not thoughtfully handled, would likely explode and bring down the hospital more effectively than the failed Rebel bomb. And yet, he would be her only ally with any power. 

“Which brings me to my next subject. That malcontent Foster,” he began. If she had not been so uneasy, she might have laughed at the coincidence of Jed’s appearance. He must have gone on his rounds first after leaving Mary but made quick work of it.

“Sir?” This was Jedediah Foster at his most contained, though he missed the formality of the uniform. He had a gravitas McBurney would never acquire and that Byron, who ran to jocularity and fat, was incapable of.

“Ah, Captain. So prompt. You continue to delight,” McBurney greeted his subordinate with the barest civility. Anne saw the way Foster pressed his lips together at the major’s tone. 

“There is something I want to address with you. If it is convenient. A matter of importance for the hospital, its proper functioning,” Foster said, his words clipped. She thought he would ask her to leave but though he glanced at her, there was no gesture or suggestion she was dismissed and she wondered if she was inhabiting another role: witness.

“And I with you, but please, do go on. You have had the running of this place for several weeks, I’m sure you believe your perspective has merit,” McBurney replied.

“My concern for a patient prompted certain words and actions for which I now feel the need to apologize. The purpose of this place is the care of the ill and injured and I have always made that my first, my last priority, but to someone more attuned to military hierarchy, someone who wishes to return to the field of combat, would be unlikely to see it so, to understand. You and I, we must come to an accord, for the greater good,” Foster said. 

Anne would have thought he had written it out, so neatly had he done it, accomplishing the apology and suggesting his own superiority, setting his imprimatur on the hospital itself, save that she’d heard him speak thus a hundred times, castigating Byron with the skill of a duelist, tailoring his insults to his target, explicating the most complex new discovery while extracting buckshot from the backside of a farmer from Pennsylvania, the words punctuated by the plink of the shot in the basin. He had not wanted to make any apology but he had seen the reason for it and he had done it while providing no avenue for McBurney to attack him.

“No mere patient, our own dear Miss Phinney. Rest assured, it was all well within my understanding,” McBurney replied, fussing with the placement of this item and that like a spinster aunt. It would seem to undercut any sense of his power except for what he had said before Foster arrived; she had a growing impression of the Major as an embodiment of erratic malevolence. She was unsure which was the greater part—his malice or his volatility and which would govern his behavior.

Foster tried to turn the conversation to a practical discussion of Mary’s treatment, undoubtedly referencing the most recent developments, his constant attempt to make this one segment of Alexandria a little Paris, but McBurney waved him off and did not notice the way Foster’s dark eyes darkened even further. The new chief then introduced what must be a fool’s errand or else they must be fools to believe it was anything other than a diversion he had not bothered to disguise, prattling about a General’s convenience when there were boys who needed surgeries Byron could not manage alone and that McBurney was sure to put off. Summers had been a drunkard who never finished the paperwork he frequently claimed kept him occupied, but he had been willing and able to actually care for the men, even if he hadn’t Foster’s flash or Byron’s doggedness. She wondered what they would return to though she knew there was no one remaining who could intercede for Mary or any other patient. It was in the Lord’s hands and Anne had never found His decisions terribly satisfying.

“And tomorrow we will discuss Miss Phinney’s care. Now, as the Russians say, ‘bystro, bystro. It means ‘quickly,’” McBurney announced, a sly smile on his lips. Foster raised his hand in a salute and left quickly, certain to be headed up the staircase to bid Mary a brief farewell. Anne was been left behind to hear McBurney’s final instruction.

“Miss Hastings, do not return before dark. By then, the deed will be done. It’s all for the best.”

He could say what he wanted, believe what he wanted; she would have to decide for herself. And for Mary.


	5. “Do you love yours?”

Mary could not help but reflect that when she had placed Jedediah Foster in isolation, she had been the only one to see to his care and he had complained, accurately, of the silence, the emptiness of the room, the distance from the rest of the hospital. Her own isolation was frequented by so many people, it should hardly share the name. Jedediah had sat for hours alone in his room as she had not been able to get away from the wards until the evening, but she had a nurse or companion at her side nearly every minute and the corners were crowded with the ghosts of her beloved dead. Even after the initial tumult had passed, she had never been alone and now it was not a nun or Matron who had shepherded her back to her room and remained a companion, but a stranger, a lovely foreign woman whose gaze was inescapable. In her bed again, Mary felt her clarity of mind returning the way the tide took the shore, slowly and then all at once the sea was full and calm, the secrets of the sand hidden again. Her father was gone, his voice no longer filling her ears, no deceitful vision in the chair that sat in the corner. He was a memory again and she was the mistress of her own mind. The chatelaine, she thought, and she smiled to imagine the bunch of keys at her belt, that unlocked every door, the lovely spill of the syllables spoken in the voice of the woman across from her. She felt oddly at ease with her, Lisette she had said she was called; Mary felt she should, she might speak. 

“My father gave me fortitude when I was sick as a child. He died soon after I married,” Mary said, aware she was talking to herself and to her father more than the woman across from her. There had been endless weeks with scarlet fever, watching the snow fall and fall, too weak to even leave the bed to watch Caroline’s red hood in the drifts on the north field, and then despite her mother’s caution, the diphtheria that had almost choked her to death; she had not been allowed to return to school for two years and the academy could teach her nothing about mathematics when she resumed her lessons. Tennyson and Longfellow and Euler had been her tutors, her father’s study her library of Alexandria. He had left her his books when he died and Caro and George had smiled through the grim, unfallen tears in their eyes at the rightness of it. Mary looked at Lisette; what must she think of this pause? The woman gazed at Mary’s face and then down at her page, the pencil moving quickly, then suddenly motionless as if it must wait to catch the line of Mary’s jaw, the fold of the nightdress over her breast before it could tell the paper. Mary knew her plaits had loosened, disheveled, and she wanted to rebraid them but it seemed what she could give Lisette was her stillness and it was a small gift. They were two women alone; Lisette would not be so overwhelmed by the unruly tumble of dark curls as a man would be, as Jedediah might…

“I’m sorry if I alarmed you. I have been ill, I have not been myself,” Mary offered. Lisette only nodded, her expression unchanged, intent and intelligent and somehow abstracted. “Why do you do this, sketch me?” Mary asked.

“It is my work and my habit. You take care of people, I draw them,” Lisette replied, her accent shaping the words the way a jeweler’s facets showed the beauty of the raw stone. Mary was intrigued by the declaration, made without any apology for what would be considered unwomanly, immodest. 

“You have a husband at war?” Lisette asked, the question unadorned, her tone light, as if it were a simple question she might put to anyone.

“No, I’m widowed. It’s been…well, quite a while now,” Mary answered. She had learned as a child, how time was capricious, how it ran from you when you needed it, how it might linger, how it could stop and refuse to be restarted, impervious to prayer or rage. How it had an affinity for loss and a disregard for pleasure, how memory subverted them both, like the falcon who soared above and around, nicking the stars with its curved beak. How long it had been since she was Gustav’s wife, Mareike, the maker of Kummelklossen and calico designs, and how short the moments that William had breathed, her grief a thousand times the span of his life? Would it be hours or a lifetime before she told Jedediah about him?

“Or do you have an _amour_? Someone you cannot resist? Who cannot resist you?” Lisette asked, teasing as if the question was not serious. A imposition. As if to have a lover was not the most refined intimacy. The Frenchwoman chuckled, not considering that her question told as much as it asked, what an amour might mean to her as much as to Mary, that her fever did not forgive every transgression. “Forgive me, _madame_ Mary, I am too inquisitive. I think because I like to look, I am allowed, that my preference gives me permission,” she added. Mary nodded and Lisette, perceiving acceptance, went on. “Painters are very aware of color. To discern, that is what drives us, and as a woman, doubly so. _Je suis une fouine_ , it means, I pry. For example, just now, when we spoke of love, your cheeks turned pink.”

“It’s complicated,” Mary said, as if the one word could contain her longing and ambivalence, her fear, Jedediah’s dark eyes, his brilliant mind, the choices he made she could not accept.

“Oh no, _cherie_. Situations are complicated. Love is simple,” Lisette replied, her tone knowing and sad, an echo of Mary’s own even if she did not agree.

“It’s not a doctor? Oh no, _pauvre_. Does he know?” Lisette went on, asking questions Mary could not answer. “I once knew a doctor who could say precisely what I felt by the pulse of a single vein.” Mary wondered what this meant, why Lisette said it. The Frenchwoman had noted earlier, she drew and Mary cared and their knowledge of bodies was informed by it. Mary thought of the way a boy felt when he was dying, the last reluctant flickers of animation, the slowing of the flesh and how it grew cool. Lisette knew vision and Mary touch; what had Lisette’s physician known?

“He sounds most observant,” Mary remarked.

“He came to Salpetrière to be a surgeon. Well, they all come for that. But more than the skill with his hands, his greatest gift was his mind,” Lisette explained. She missed this man, Mary could hear it, and she wondered how the other woman had lost him. “ _Diagnostique_ , seeing subtle signs of malady. And how he wanted to comprehend, to know why, how he delighted in discovery! This world was not enough for him, he accepted nothing. It brought him accolades and trouble, his treatments, they were very imaginative.” A rare man, it appeared, and Mary thought of the treatment that belonged to the doctor and that of the nurse; even in her sickbed, she might yet recall her vocation and what she was capable of.

“Did you love him? Do you still?” she asked gently. She had only overlooked one thing but it was the crucial feature. Lisette was a woman with all a woman’s guile and insight, with the understanding of what a question meant and how it could be an answer.

“Do you love yours?”


	6. “No, I am not ready to go!”

She did not have the luxury of rage. She’d seen it in his eyes when she had begged—McBurney would not hesitate to drag her from the room himself. Not only that, he was eager to lay his hands upon her uncorseted waist, his thumbs pressed against the edge of her ribs, on both her wrists tight enough to leave marks. He wanted any excuse to hiss filth in her ear in the perversion of a lover’s coaxing, to keep calling her a name that was not her own _Mariya, Mariya_ as he had muttered when she said please. He had used a different tone to order Emma and Sister Isabella, the approximation of an officer’s crisp instruction, but there was some critical damage in his voice when he spoke to her, as if he could not decide who he addressed, which self he was himself—the officer, the man, a foe or supplicant. He had raised a hand as if he would touch her face again or her hair but there had been some sound and he’d let it fall. Then she knew he would not be constrained by any law or civility and that she must decide how she would go.

“Does he know?” she had asked, meaning Jedediah and she had seen McBurney’s confusion before his jealous scowl. He had not answered but his response was enough. She understood he had deceived them both but she did not understand why he had fixated on her. The excuse he made, “This is in your own best interest… you must understand that typhoid threatens the patients and staff,” he did not believe enough to bring any conviction to it. She knew that though lax, her isolation had been adequate to prevent the spread of the disease she herself had acquired on the wards and that no one could consider her care to be anything other than exceptional, her physician Paris-trained, her nurse Miss Nightingale’s own emissary, the nuns and Miss Green more competent than her own elderly aunt Lucretia, her brother’s over-worked wife Abigail could ever be. Major McBurney had plotted her exile, seen to it the two people who would defend her were absent, even misled Miss Dix to act against her deputy’s interest. He had not waited ten minutes after sending Sister Isabella to help her dress before he entered the room; had he thought to catch her unawares, to see what he should not? He had cried it was indecorous when Jedediah helped her to the tub of water but propriety had not governed his earlier untoward, unwitnessed examination of her, if that was what it was to be called; she was a widow and she knew the touch of a man’s hands, how to read intention. McBurney might call it by another name but he had been making unwelcome advances, fondling her face and hair for his gratification, when Jedediah’s hands had been only a kind physician’s until she had not let go, until she had altered what was between them.

The women had tried to intervene. Emma had suggested they wait for Dr. Foster’s return and Sister Isabella had nodded vigorously; McBurney had dismissed them crossly, like a little boy rejecting his sister’s direction. Lisette had appealed to the man’s vanity, remarking what a shame it would be if anyone misconstrued what was happening in such haste, the dismay the men might turn to disapprobation for their chief if they thought he was forcing the departure of a delirious gentlewoman. For a moment, Mary had hoped. And then he had turned his eyes to her again, the plaits that hung over each shoulder, tendrils round her face, the billowing muslin around her and the curve of her hip visible within and had barked, 

“Enough. Get her ready or don’t. She leaves regardless,” then stalked out to the chorus of gasps.

Emma had murmured, “I’m sorry, Nurse Mary. I’ll go speak to the lady Miss Dix sent…I’ll explain,” and then slipped from the room, leaving Mary holding onto the iron bedframe, Sister Isabella and Lisette on either side like ladies-in-waiting to a vanquished queen.

“ _Ma petite_ , let us help you. Take some water at least,” Lisette said, laying a hand on Mary’s shoulder, offering her the tin cup of water from the bedside. Mary drank, coughing a little when she tasted her own tears and she felt the ache in her hips, her knees at a distance, aware it would not be long before she could not ignore the excruciating pain everywhere she was fitted together, a broken doll. Lisette was gesturing to Sister Isabella, instructing her. “She needs something she can travel in, a dress that does not require stays, slippers and not boots, a bonnet. She is too weak for anything heavy, no? But she must stay warm.”

They dressed her between themselves; she let them draw the nightdress over her head and she was obscurely touched by their mutual distressed exhalation at the sight of her emaciation, the pallor of her skin now that the rash had faded. She recalled the way her mother had touched her and her sister, both lost to her, and how Isabella and Lisette’s hands had the same compassionate feminine sympathy; there was no other way for them to defy McBurney other than to make sure she was given tenderness now and in that, they were generous, lavish even. She was half-dazed with her fury and the fever’s imminent return, with the grief and shame at being cast out, the new pain of being the one who left the beloved and was not left behind but they moved around her as she suffered and it was a blessing. Lisette went through the drawers and took out the most precious items with an unerring eye, tucking them in a small carpet-bag. She draped the paisley shawl around Mary’s shoulders and murmured, “ _Comme c’est tres belle!_ ” unable to see without her artist’s eye even as Mary’s heart was breaking. 

“Your doctor, shall we give him a message from you?” Lisette asked and Mary raised grateful eyes to this stranger who was already, somehow her friend, who could imagine what Mary would regret most.

“I would do it myself, if you can find me some paper and a pen. I shan’t take very long,” she said. 

There was so little time and there was not much she could say; she wanted Jedediah to understand how she left and why but she must consider how he would react, how he would keep the letter with him, against his breast, to be read and re-read, to hear her voice when she had gone. Her head had begun to ache dreadfully and she knew this might be a further journey than she had anticipated, to a place he could not follow her. There would not be time for beauty, only the truth. It would have to do for them both. She did not cry; she could not afford rage and neither could she spend herself in weeping. Her New England thrift must serve her this last time.


	7. “I cannot rest from travel”

She had almost taken the sonnets with the Tennyson from the sutler’s tent. They had been Robin’s favorite and Anne had spent so many hours reading them, it seemed the words lingered in her mouth like the kisses he couldn’t give her except with his eyes. Now, they came to her in the night with her dreams the whiskey could not dissolve. Byron had remarked upon it once, a morning she’d woken with the sheet tangled around her, his heavy body blocking out the newly born day, how she was reciting in her sleep, how he hadn’t known she was such a bluestocking while he ran his hand along her bare thigh. She’d snapped something, “not now” or “you bloody fool” and it was her tone more than the words that had made him draw back. He was not a bright man but he didn’t need many lessons from her.

Jed Foster was pushing the horse brutally hard. The pace was now what she had complained of before, enough to sicken even the steadiest, but she was silent and let her hands lie in her lap. There had been a minute or two after she had told him what McBurney planned when Jed had contemplated unhitching the team and riding back but she’d made him see reason; he was a forty year old surgeon, not a youth of twenty or skilled cavalry officer, and there was no saddle, the horse used to trotting with a smart carriage behind, not supporting a rider galloping to outrun death. She hadn’t even mentioned that he would have left her behind with a useless carriage, a woman alone on the outskirts of an Army camp; he might be a gentleman born but chivalry was nothing to him and it would not have occurred to Foster than she was in any danger. 

He’d given the book back to her so he could use both hands on the reins and she had not regretted her confession, only how long it had taken to make. He would forgive her afterward, for the chance, for the betrayal she’d chosen, but she would not. She knew how longer she had waited. Anne heard Mary’s voice calling for Jed, how it broke, how she swallowed her tears and Anne saw Robin’s eyes looking up at her, the blue of an overcast Kentish sky and then not a color she knew the name of, that would have rendered even the Bard mute. Foster laid the whip on the horse’s straining flank and she thought, perhaps he would be in time, that they would return before dark.


	8. “Will he be there?”

Samuel hadn’t bothered to tell him to hurry. He was the most gifted surgeon at Mansion House and he knew how long to make the incision, how deep, what was required. Jed had run the few block from the hospital to the dock, paying attention to his breath, where his feet hit the road, her name _Mary Mary Mary_ driving him, ignoring the darkness that grew deeper regardless of his choice. _I would stay with you_ he had told her when the sun shone and it had made her happy, that the truth was a promise, and now he was breaking it, his promise, her fearful gladness, he would be too late to beg forgiveness.

It was a shock to see her face framed by the plain bonnet, the paisley shawl he’d given her glowing in the torchlight. She had never worn it before for him to see and he could not help the satisfaction that he had been right, how it suited her, how she suited it. Someone passed in front of him and he pushed by, afraid she would not be there, afraid she had not.

“Mary?” he shouted through the crowd. He saw when she realized it was him, the subtle change in the angle of her jaw, the slow way she dropped her gaze, her relief, her exhaustion.

“Mary!” he repeated, at her side now; she was propped up on a makeshift stretcher, half covered by the counterpane that had been on her bed when he left in the morning. Her hands were bare but he saw something dark on her left wrist, carved black beads like unmatched lace cuff. The right hand trembled and he could hardly keep from raising his own to touch her face, to check her pulse, to pull her into his arms so she might lay her head on his shoulder. “Mary, I came as quickly--”

“Sir!” An older woman in a drab bonnet and travelling cloak interrupted, her tone the firm chaperone, a Massachusetts duenna, ready to defend Mary’s honor from the strange officer on his knees beside her.

“Step aside, she’s my patient! He—she was released without my permission, she shouldn’t be out of bed,” he cried. Mary made a low, pained sound and he laid a hand on her cheek without thinking, assessing her fever; it had returned, not dangerous yet, but there was nothing at hand to mitigate it, his black bag left in the carriage. “She’s feverish, she needs—get a moist cloth, some water, and hurry!” Command outweighed anxiety in his tone and the woman left to fetch something he’d asked for.

“I’m here, I’m right here, Mary,” he said and she reached a hand towards him, catching his open coat.

“I thought I might not see you again, too late—he made me go, I didn’t want to, he didn’t care,” she replied, nearly rambling, her eyes bright with tears. Jed felt anger towards McBurney that was so vast, so encompassing that it blotted out everything. He understood what the men meant when they talked about a battle lust, a frenzy for murder as he never had before. Then Mary’s hand slipped from his coat and the fury was overlaid with an overwhelming urge to protect her, a potent, compelling gentleness he hadn’t known he was capable of.

“If I’d know, oh! I never would have left you, never, I’d move heaven and earth to keep you with me,” he exclaimed urgently but softly, surprised to see her old amused smile for a moment as she murmured,

“So passionate, Jedediah! Perhaps you missed your calling in the Lyceum.”

“Perhaps. But medicine suits me,” he said and then the woman returned, offering a dampened linen cloth.

“Who are you?” he asked without ceremony, knowing it was rude, knowing he didn’t have a choice.

“I’m Mrs. Henry Garland, sent by Miss Dix to escort this woman home. And who are you?” she said briskly, taking in how Mary inclined towards him, her hand in his.

“Dr. Foster, Captain Foster in the Union Army, of Mansion House Hospital. I’ve been treating Baroness von Olnhausen for typhoid, she is our Head Nurse. We have a new chief and he has done this, this travesty,” Jed replied.

“She does seem very ill, far too ill to travel. I couldn’t understand it, when we arrived. Your chief, a Major I think, he was very insistent… the Baroness must leave, he had no concern that she might worsen. A young nurse took me aside, almost in secret, and told me a little of the story but there was nothing I could do, you see. I have written instructions from Miss Dix and if I didn’t take Miss, Baroness von Olnhausen, I think he should have thrown her out in the street. She has been no trouble but I don’t like the look of her,” Mrs. Garland said. She was far more astute than he had expected and thought, she might be an ally, perhaps it was not quite so bleak. Then the steamship’s horn sounded.

“That’s her ship, it’s leaving soon,” she said. There may have been some apology in her voice, he didn’t notice.

“I don’t give a damn about the ship! By all that is holy, she’s not going anywhere,” he cursed, feeling his fear for her return as Mary only closed her eyes at his tirade, one she would not have tolerated even this morning.

“Dr. Foster, you misunderstand me—I don’t want to take her from you but what else can I do? Where would you take her, if I somehow could let you, a man not her husband nor any other relation, assume responsibility for her? I should need a justification for Miss Dix, for myself—I have been charged with her care. I am a nurse as she is and I will not risk my patient on your temper,” she said. He could not argue that she was unreasonable, he could hardly argue at all with the ship’s horn blaring and Mary starting to moan a little, as if she did not want him to observe her distress but could not conceal it.

He considered Mrs. Garland’s question—how could he keep Mary with him? How could he keep her safe? He could not bring her back to Mansion House, not tonight, and there was no other place in Alexandria for her. He thought briefly of Charlotte Jenkins’s camp hospital but knew Mary would not accept care that was meant for contraband, that he could not bring her back and risk Miss Jenkins kind but firm refusal. He could not trust her in the Green’s family home even if somehow he could convince them to take her. He felt the book Anne had given him in his pocket and reached in.

“Take this. I don’t know where Miss Dix meant for you to stay, but this should be enough for the Willard. Take her there and I’ll come tomorrow, I’ll find a way,” he said, offering her all the money he had on him, enough for at least a few days of relative comfort, a chance. Mary shifted, a curl coming loose from her simple coiffure, and he brushed it back without thinking of how it looked. Mrs. Garland took a breath that was not a sigh but the next thing.

“And if you cannot? What then?” she said, taking the greenbacks and placing them in her reticule.

“I can. I must. But you might call upon Dr. Summers in the Army Medical Corps. He knows the Baroness well, he would serve as her advocate. Where were you, how far were you taking her?” Jed replied.

“North of Manchester. There’s a brother, I think, or a cousin? With a farm? Seeing her now, like this, I don’t believe she could stand the journey. I can wait, I can stay with her for a few days and then,” she said, shrugging at the end.

“And then I will be there. Before. Tomorrow, I shan’t keep her waiting, I won’t,” he declared. He saw the older woman take his measure and knew, at least this once, he had not been found wanting.

“I’ll go check on her accommodations, let you say goodbye,” she said and walked away, smoothing her skirts. He took out the book.

“Mary, dearest, look! The poem, Miss Hastings found it for you, Ulysses. ‘That which we are, we are…’” he recited. Mary’s expression changed, less pained, more dreamy and she whispered,

“‘One equal temper… of heroic hearts made weak by…’”

“‘Time and fate. But strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find…’” he went on, putting all his conviction, his love, his soul into the words that must take the place of an embrace, of him taking her into his arms and stealing away into the night.

“‘And not to yield,’” she finished, grasping the book tightly in her ungloved hand. She smiled up at him and he thought, she was strong, it was only a day, she would be fine…

“Will he be there? Will he be waiting?” she asked expectantly.

“Who, Mary?” he answered, confused.

“Jedediah. Will he be waiting for me?” she replied and he felt the coldest dread throughout, that she was delirious, that he could not tell her goodbye and know that she understood. He leaned over and pressed a kiss to her burning forehead, to her drawn cheek. He took her free hand and kissed her palm, then folded it in his own.

“I shall see you before long, my dearest. My Mary. It won’t be long, just wait for me a little while,” he said, then nodded at Mrs. Garland. He could not let go of Mary’s hand though, despite knowing she must go now and he let the air break their grasp, the night and the darkness.


	9. “Tho’ much is taken, much abides”

“I want a furlough for two weeks’ time,” Jed said, without any greeting or preamble.

McBurney sat at the desk that had been his only a few weeks ago, a position he had yearned to be free of and now regretted losing. If he had remained chief, Mary would be lying upstairs in her bed, Sister Isabella watching over her until he could come up, an empty bowl of broth on the bedside table. He would be hurrying through the paperwork because she was waiting for him and if she were sleeping when he found her, she would be turned to the chair he occupied, her plaited hair revealing her pale face, looking like the young girl she had once been, her sleep untroubled. But a letter had come with Summers’s promotion and he had blessed it, unwise enough to rejoice at the prospect of only practicing medicine and sort out the separation from Eliza. Now, McBurney was the chief and had used his power to deceive Jed, to send Mary away, resorting to subterfuge since he could not succeed in challenging Jed directly. Why McBurney had been so insistent in forcing Mary to leave was a mystery, one Jed frankly didn’t care about solving; he only wanted to get to Mary as quickly as possible and to make sure she was safe and properly cared for. There were limitations to what he could accomplish without being her husband, but he was willing to use every other resource at his disposal and he had several.

“I believe you forget yourself, Captain Foster. You have not made a report about your visit to the General, nor have you inquired about the state of Mansion House in your absence,” McBurney replied, stroking a finger along his jaw. “Nurse Hastings has been back for hours—I might consider your late arrival consistent with you abandoning your duty...desertion, if you will.”

“I want the furlough,” Jed repeated, his left hand in a fist. He would not be drawn into any irrelevant discussion about the pox-ridden General, whether Byron Hale had managed to complete two or three amputations today, anything that derailed him from his only purpose.

“You want? It is not your place to make demands of me! I am your superior officer, though you might prefer to forget it, shamed to be commanded by a man younger than yourself,” McBurney exclaimed, his left eye twitching as he slapped his hand down on the desk’s blotter, making the inkwell shake.

“I don’t give a damn about any of that. You will give me that furlough or you’ll have my signed resignation from my commission within the hour and only one surgeon left in this God-forsaken place!”

“This is about that woman, isn’t it? Mariya—the Baroness? Shall you tell me again how she is only your patient? How your concern is simply that of any physician?” McBurney said. His color was up and his eyes were shining with some malicious glee, as if he savored impugning the reputation of woman uniformly known to value honesty, goodness and principles.

“I see. I’ll have my resignation on your desk within the hour then. Dr. Hale will have to decide which of my surgeries he’s prepared to take on tomorrow,” Jed declared. He wouldn’t waste any more time when it was better spent planning his departure, packing up and meeting with Samuel and Miss Jenkins, as Mary would want him to. Mrs. Garland had agreed to stay with Mary in Washington City for a few days but she could not tarry longer than that.

“Come now, you’re not going to throw over everything for her, Foster. It’s pointless, in any case—it’s out of our hands, your and mine. If she dies, it’s God’s will and there’s nothing you can do about it,” McBurney answered, beginning with some pathetic attempt at manly conciliation, devolving to a tired platitude about God that had never been a comfort to anyone and could not obscure the man’s expectation of Mary’s death. Jed had been making every effort to keep his temper in check, to complete his interview with his savage fury banked, but the airy way McBurney said it if she dies undid all dams. She had been getting better, perhaps more slowly than he wanted to see, but it was the abrupt expulsion into the night, with only a tired, inexperienced woman to try and keep her alive until the dawn, that endangered her so; McBurney’s action might be a death sentence for the sweetest, best woman Jed had ever met, the only woman he’d ever love. If she died—Jed could not allow himself to peer into that abyss but he knew he would follow her, though he would let the needle take him and not a bullet like that Rebel. He would take his chances that it was only death that was needed to unite them or death then would swiftly, helpfully, blessedly end the desperate hurt of being without her.

“If she dies, I’ll kill you,” he said. 

“Is that a threat, Foster?” McBurney asked, unable to suppress the way his voice shook, high and thready.

“It’s the truth. It’s a promise I won’t break,” Jed said, turning to leave, forcing himself to the door instead of to McBurney’s side to strangle him, the man who would kill Mary and expect a salute for it.

“The documents will be on the desk, for the furlough. Effective tomorrow. You have two weeks, Foster,” McBurney said, hurriedly. Jed didn’t know what had made him back down; perhaps the prospect of actually having to practice medicine or deal with the disgrace of a hospital ground to a halt without adequate staffing, the unexpected departure of the hospital’s chief surgeon sure to cast a shadow on his commanding officer.

He walked from the office and up the stairs to his room. He must pack some clothes, those essential items he could not risk leaving behind, and decide without the clamor of the dock around him what was to be done for Mary. He had bought some time with the money he’d given to Mrs. Garland and his explanation and the furlough meant there was a little more, for him to assume charge of Mary and bring her somewhere she could regain her health but where? He passed an orderly and asked the man to have some coffee brought up; he’d eaten no dinner in the mad flight back to meet Mary and he couldn’t stomach any but the bright heat of the coffee, the fortifying intensity even without sugar to soften the poor roasting, was not a luxury tonight but a necessity.

He was finishing the cup at his desk, looking out into the night the window held for him and doing his best to pray when there was a rap on the door. It couldn’t be McBurney and though he did not wish for any company, he couldn’t imagine there was anyone at the hospital who was not dismayed at the very least by Mary’s exile; even Hale would shake his shaggy head and say it was a dirty business and Anne would not correct him. Jed found himself hoping it could be Samuel Diggs, Mary’s friend in ways that Jed had never been, a man of uncommon bravery, uncommon acuity, and a rare indomitable spirit like Mary’s own. If it were Samuel, he could let his head drop into his hands and ask the question aloud that tormented him,

“What shall I do?”

It was not Samuel and his hope, which had not been so very great, was not so much dashed as blown out, like a guttering wick. He drained the last of the coffee and called out,

“Come in.”

The door was opened by a cautious hand, revealing Sister Isabella. Her habit and coif were pristine despite the hour but her eyes looked tired and were red-rimmed, the tip of her nose pink. She bit her lower lip and he realized she was probably even younger than Emma Green.

“Good evening, Sister. What can I do for you?” he asked.

“Oh, Dr. Foster, I am so sorry. About Miss Mary. I thought, I prayed you would come back in time but,” she said and he heard the tears she had wept in her voice.

“But I did not. Not enough time to stop this travesty, but I saw her at the dock, I spoke with that nurse Miss Dix sent. You mustn’t trouble yourself, Sister, there was nothing you could do,” he replied. 

She had cared for Mary diligently, never expressing the least concern about contagion, and he had seen how conscientious she had been about preparing Mary for travel, arranging her hair simply but decorously, making sure she was warmly dressed. He had seen the jet rosary that was wound around Mary’s thoroughly Unitarian wrist and he had known who was responsible and who else would be praying for Mary’s safety tonight.

“I don’t think you’re right, Dr. Foster. But that’s my burden to bear,” she said, then drew a small packet of envelopes from the hidden pocket of her voluminous black skirts and held them out to him. “Miss Mary, before she left, she wrote this and told me to give it to you. And also, there were a few letters that came for you in the post and I brought them. I’ll leave you now but know that I, that all the sisters, we will be praying for Miss Mary’s health and her immortal soul. She has such a good heart, it should be easy for the Lord to hear us,” she said, then ducked her head and slipped out the door while he looked at the letters in his hand.

He opened the one from Mary first. He recognized her hand and he thought of her sitting on the edge of the bed, using the last few minutes to write to him. The message wasn’t very long and the lines were uneven, unlike her save that she still trembled with fever, with the pangs in her belly she tried to conceal from him but which he had read in the corners of her mouth, the way she closed her eyes.

> Dearest Jedediah,
> 
> I’m so sorry, I won’t be here when you return. I tried, I begged and he wouldn’t listen. He said it was Miss Dix’s decision, that she demanded I leave. He said terrible things and there was no one else to stop him. Do not be angry at Dr. Hale, he was operating, he knew nothing of it. Don’t trouble yourself, I have been getting stronger every day. I do wish I had been able to say goodbye to you, that we had spoken as you said we would. I wish I had told you I love you for I do, I have and I will. God bless you, Jedediah.
> 
> Mary

His eyes had filled with tears as they hadn’t when he’d held her hand at the dock, when he’d kissed her goodbye. She had written this sure she would not see him again and she had taken the time to try and reassure him, to prevent a breach with Hale. He could never deserve her, her tenderness and her constancy, her intrepid spirit, her earnest intelligence and her utter, incontrovertible sincerity. He had thought to give her time, to give them both time before they spoke of their attachment but she had had none and she had not flinched, committing herself to him in every way that mattered. He wiped the tears from his eyes lest they fall and mar what she had left for him. God willing, this time tomorrow, he would be answering her with her hand held in both of his, telling her directly how much, how long, how deeply he loved her and explaining what that would mean for her. There would be complexities to unravel but he would manage them. He must.

There was only one other envelope though he only wanted to read Mary’s words, to listen to her saying them within his mind, her contralto voice low but clear; she would have faced him and looked into his eyes as she said them, as he held his breath. He tore open the second letter and saw it was a telegram.

Western Union  
Sacramento to Washington City

Settlement accepted. Document en route. Sign and return for finalization. Dissolution effective upon receipt and filing with state government. Will notify of official date. T. Howard, Esq.

It was nearly done then. If this had come, if the final documents had come only a few weeks ago, Mary would be down the hall or he would have found a place for her in Alexandria. If, if! He couldn’t think that way, he could only accept that he would be free but not quite soon enough. He could not send her to the shut-up house in Baltimore; he could not do that to Eliza and Mary would refuse. He could not imagine Mary would survive the strain of a journey all the way to Manchester where she had some cousins, an older half-brother with a farm. He could not bring her back to Alexandria unless she was his wife and it would be weeks yet before he could ask. It would have to be Washington City, it would have to be Summers and he would have to beard the dragon Dix in her Spartan den.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Crelle's Journal_ , or just Crelle, is the common name for a mathematics journal, the Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik (in English: Journal for Pure and Applied Mathematics). The journal was founded by August Leopold Crelle (Berlin) in 1826 and edited by him until his death in 1855. It was one of the first major mathematical journals that was not a proceedings of an academy (Neuenschwander 1994, p. 1533). It has published many notable papers, including works of Niels Henrik Abel, Georg Cantor, Gotthold Eisenstein, Leonhard Euler, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Otto Hesse. It was edited by Carl Wilhelm Borchardt from 1856–80, during which time it was known as Borchardt's Journal.
> 
> I should have Mary refer to it as _Borchardt's Journal_ but I fell in love with _Crelle_ , so I'm sticking with my historical anachronism, consciously :)


End file.
